They annihilated every record of your voice,
falsified every narrative you wrote.
They smeared your opus, brushed it with reeked milk,
used the sleeve of their golden coats to hide the strokes.
His shadowed foothold; the statues rampaged apart,
History now devoured by fabricated dates and ruptured scars.
The time they plunged into the end of the day,
a present curated with scrutiny with their Watch.
Machiavellian pinnacles and desolation mirror;
and, then did a thunderstruck from the sea of abomination.
For the sonorous tones of the voice from the tempest, were not
the tones of any one essential but of a multitude of beings.
They fell duskily upon their ears,
the chants: of the brotherhood and sisterhood.
Riotous voices of the ones who remembered,
uttering syllable by syllable – a New Testament.
Aishwarya Khale has studied English at the University of Oxford. She has worked at UNDP India and SWA India. She has published her poetry and fiction in IMDB critics’ reviews, The Royal Society of Literature, Indian Rumination, The Chakkar, The Criterion Journal, Melbourne Culture Corner, The Wokingham Today, The London Reader, Hillingdon’s Women’s archives, BBC Radio, CIUT Radio, Round Table Literary Journal (USA), ALMA magazine, The Indian review, Creative Ireland, Studio Appalachia, Cork Festival Poetry Initiative 2022 and Staffordshire History Festival 2021. Her play has been performed at The Golden Goose Theatre in London.
Featured image: Tanner Mardis / Unsplash